Being paranoid is quite helpful when hardening a system.

Sure, here are a number of sources:

• ITSFOSS: Organic Maps Forked Over Governance Concerns

• Wikibooks: MAPS.ME to Organic Maps/OM Crisis

• Openletter: Open Letter to Organic Maps Shareholders

I did move last week and it’s such a difference. A clean refreshing interface without all the clutter, also much snappier, maps don’t take time to refresh.

You can download maps while having WiFi connection and, for a start, only the maps of the country you are staying in at the moment.

CoMaps has optional 3D view of buildings and surprised me with how few features it has, yet exactly the features one needs. That way the interface is clean while I’m not missing anything.

It even has quick access to Wikipedia articles built in so you get directly information of points you click on.

Object information is down to what you need, like floor level, pbone number, opening times.

Import/Export for all location data.

OrganicMaps refused to rule out selling to venture capitalists in the future. They expect volunteers to contribute while keeping the option of capitalizing on free work later.

That’s why it has been forked to what is called CoMaps. So CoMaps is the true, reliable FOSS project now.

You can escape from chat control by using a decentralized protocol like XMPP though.

Any centralized chat protocol is prone to centralized control. This is why Signal Messenger is also affected.

Opting-out of this threat is only possible by using a decentralized protocoll that can also be easily setup by individuals.

Matrix is practically centralized as the majority of its users is on one server, probably due to the setup being not so easy.

There are decentralized protocols that are also practically decentralized. First coming to my mind: XMPP. Many servers offer sign-up for free. If someone wants to setup their own server instead, it takes an hour with Prosody including all configuration. They made it particularly easy as decentralization is their selling point.

In Taiwanese cities you have public bathrooms within a radius of a 10 minutes walk, and they are as clean as hotel bathrooms, and for free. People in Taiwan leave bathrooms clean as they found it, and there is no vandalism in Taiwan. It works if the society is healthy, teenagers and adults of all social classes following common sense of being nice to others and keeping things intact.

For technical notes, I’d recommend Sphinx docs or single reStructuredText files on a cloud storage or repository. You can create all kind of formats (PDF, HMTL, ect.) from it, and it’s future proof.

Trac was great years ago. As much as I know, they were stuck on Python 2 until the very last moment 3 years ago, so it became almost unusable, and the UI is not responsive even today, not usable on phone. It used to be really great, but be careful relying on it before doing research on its current development.

Nextcloud Deck has an app as well that is on F-Droid.

OMG, not a smart decision from prism-break to move to Gitlab.com.

I didn’t know about that, thanks for telling.

It’s true, as for recommendations from websites, you should never trust them blindly but do your own research as well.

For Linux distributions though, as there’s no other practical way than trusting them with the packages they provide, one needs to make sure the people behind the project persue the right values. The project itself needs to earn your trust or at least not have a record of violating it.

Distributions based on Ubuntu like Linux Mint take pro-active steps to prevent their users from being affected by Canonical’s decisions (the company that controls Ubuntu). So as long as they detect all malicious implementations from Canonical, you are safe. But I personally prefer a purely community based distribution like Fedora in which things like that won’t happen in the first place. In contrast to Fedora, Ubuntu is under control of Canonical, a private company, which apparently plays a too significant role in strategic decisions that go against its users, and you never know if the Linux Mint team can respond to everything that Canonical is doing. Currently, Mint is removing Ubuntu’s online search integration, privacy violations, and replace some of Ubuntu’s Snap packages as they oppose Ubuntu’s decision and centralized control that comes with Snap packages. As I said above, for me it feels more right though to have a distribution that doesn’t need to work around questionable implementations of its parent distribution.

The problem with Ubuntu is that trust in a package manager is a basic criteria when evaluating a distribution. Once Canonical had violated that trust and shown its attitude with privacy violations, data collection, and default opt-in, you should stay away from anything that comes from Canonical. They didn’t get away with what they did, but the mindset behind their actions is part of how that company is run and what they might do in the future without letting you know. They were trying to establish an income channel by knowingly sacrificing the user’s privacy and security. That’s a no-go in my opinion.

They promote Ubuntu-based distros, which cannot be trusted anymore, and they forget to mention Fedora as a better alternative.

Here is why you shouldn’t use Ubuntu:

Canonical’s Ubuntu is not recommended because it contains Amazon ads and data leaks by default. GNU/Linux distributions based on Ubuntu are also currently not recommended due to several other reasons.

Source: https://prism-break.org/en/subcategories/gnu-linux-operating-systems/

I appreciate your detailed description of the probable benefits of telemetry. While I acknowledge there are benefits, however, before accepting a given set of telemetry, I would like to know with sources and in exact terms (not just ‘improved UI’) what enhancements were made to Firefox that couldn’t be achieved without telemetry. I want to decide for myself if those features are truly important enough to justify sending my personal data to the developers. Only then can I make an informed decision, and it still wouldn’t necessarily mean agreement. It’s not paranoia; it’s simply refusing telemetry for any reason given.

Privacy always comes at a cost. We are all different and have varying preferences based on our experiences and perspectives. Deciding how much privacy one wants to give up for convenience or other benefits is a personal choice. There’s no need to judge others for that decision. To each their own.

There’s certainly a trade-off by not having Telemetry, and I prefer privacy over some “slightly better development”. It is not necessary for good development.

Websites collect information, but I expect that in a public space, and also aggregating information across websites isn’t so easy. However, I have higher expectations for my web browser. When something is installed on my laptop, it’s like my house, and I don’t want anything to access my private space without permission.

Even worse, Firefox has it implemented as Opt-Out. Telemetry by default and without asking the user isn’t good practice. At the very least, they should give users a choice before enabling it. Yet, they collect everyone’s IP address and other information at least once when you start up Firefox for the first time. This doesn’t deserve my trust.

I don’t want to play a game of ‘what do I need to opt-out for privacy’ with an entity that I need to trust. Why would I use Firefox if Icecat gives me the level of trust that I need. It’s a personal choice.

By default Firefox collects data and sends it to their server, which Icecat doesn’t. I don’t want having to use another service like NextDNS to protect me against the application that I want to be able to trust because I’m using it for a lot of personal data.

From the mozilla website itself:

Identification:

When Firefox sends data to us, your IP address is temporarily collected as part of our server logs.

And then the data that I don’t want to share with other entities:

Interaction data includes information about your interactions with Firefox such as number of open tabs and windows, number of webpages visited, number and type of installed Firefox Add-ons and session length, as well as Firefox features offered by Mozilla or our partners such as interaction with Firefox search features and search partner referrals.

Technical data includes information about your Firefox version and language, device operating system and hardware configuration, memory, basic information about crashes and errors, outcome of automated processes like updates and safebrowsing.